It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but the first draft of chapter 6 is done (6,800 words). This was parts of another, very long chapter split into two, and covers things from the Victorian era like flagellation erotica, fetish letter columns and the flagellation culture of Eton. The remainder will go into chapter 7, with more Victoriana like Krafft-Ebing, Sacher-Masoch and the network of kinksters that coalesced around Richard Moncton-Milnes, later Lord Houghton. This probably won’t take long to get to first draft stage, just some reogan

I’m still not completely happy with the organization of these two chapters, and may reorganize them in a second draft. There’s a lot of information to cover, and it all interconnects in loose ways. Alan Moore, in the preface to From Hell, quoted somebody else as saying, “One measures a circle, starting anywhere.”

I’ve decided to press on instead of editing (or writing more blog posts), as I think it is more valuable to get a presentable complete draft finished than to refine. There are still areas I haven’t really begun to research.

I should also mention that my fiction short story “The Thing in the Printer” has been accepted by Ghostwoods Books for their Cthulhu Lives Lovecraftian horror anthology.

Despite Vimeo attributing it to Marc Campbell, IMDB lists it as Dressing for Pleasure (1977) directed by John Samson and Mike Wallington, about the 1970s UK leather/rubber/latex scene. Including interviews with John Sutcliffe of Atomage fame, and a clerk at McLaren-Westwood’s SEX shop.

I like the framing device of the models posing in and around a giant book printed, as if the people in the photos and illustrations of something like John Willie’s Bizarre or an Atomage catalogue magically came to life.

If there’s a predominant theme in Cole’s book on the history of gay fashion in the twentieth century, it’s that gay fashion is always imperfectly mimetic, a tangled mix of “passing, minstrelization and capitulation”, to quote sociologist Martin P. Levine (pg. 3)

Its importance begins in infancy. “When people say they hate being tickled and there’s no reason for it, they forget that it’s one of the first avenues of communication between mothers and babies,” he says. “You have the mother and baby engaged in this kind of primal, neurologically programmed interaction.” Or the father: I tickle my son; he shrieks; I tickle him more; he shrieks more; I tickle him yet more; he starts wailing. I apologize.

In a sense, this is our first conversation—how we manage to talk with someone despite being preverbal. The content here is socioemotional, and as a form of social binding, it preceded the development of language, Provine says.

New research suggests that many mammal species tickle (or can be tickled), including humans, chimpanzees, squirrels, elephants and even rats. There’s a back and forth to tickling play that suggests the back and forth of BDSM: figuring out the boundaries between pleasure and pain, between intimacy and invasion, between the self and the other. It’s a symbolic attack.

Vintage Sleaze has a post on Tana Louise, the premier fetish/bondage model before Bettie Page and girlfriend of bondage pioneer Lenny Burtman.

The post ends with stating that the 1940s/1950s porn/fetish/kink world is still largely unexplored:

There are thousands of untold stories from the golden days of sleaze, as this blog proves, and that there have been over 800 posts here already only indicates how many more are to be told. Yet, from this writer’s perch, Tana Louise is the MAJOR untold story of the 1950s. A story not even scratched.

Amputee fetish site Overground.be has a collection of amputee fetish and letters published in London Life magazine, running from 1924 to 1941 and most signed “Wallace Stort”. Some of the letters also concerned prosthetic limbs, orthopedic boots, crutches and other devices. These were published alongside other types of fetish letters and stories.

More interesting are the cards taken in North Africa. These tried to evoke the image of the harem, a fantasy of erotic mystery and subjugation. It is again believed that most of the models would have been prostitutes. Given the strictures of Arab society it is hard to imagine ordinary women posing nude; nor would photographers, who were European, have had ready access to real harems….